In Solvej Balle’s new series, the concept of a time loop is more than a gimmick; it’s a way of rethinking human existence.
— Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
The fourth installment of Balle’s expansive and highly ambitious septology teems with new faces, new people, and voices from every corner of the Western world
We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, and people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.
In Solvej Balle’s new series, the concept of a time loop is more than a gimmick; it’s a way of rethinking human existence.
— Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
The novel’s propulsive imaginative brilliance lies in Tara’s metaphoric search for a language with which to communicate the sheer incomprehensibility of her condition. Her days are compared to a beach, a stream, a puzzle, a construction, a container. "I haven’t found a way out of the eighteenth of November," she laments at the end of the second volume. As readers, we are only beginning to figure out how to navigate this beguiling, haunting novel, wherever it ends up taking us.
— Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post
Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time—and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day.
— Hernan Diaz
On the Calculation of Volume is a thrilling example of what an author can do with narrative when time doesn't work in a traditional way. It's a tragic story with so many moments of hope.
— The Maris Review
A speculative novel that, with each new volume, feels ever more intensely about the present. A lively entry in a provocative series, thick with questions about morals and ethics.
— Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
This fourth volume (of seven) is a meditation on time that takes place on an endless Nov. 18, giving the time-loop narrative new and stunning proportions.
— The New York Times
Remarkable... This will leave readers counting down the days to the next installment.
— Publishers Weekly
A symphony of voices, kind, curious, various, energetic and possibly healing... Balle's serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see that we have constructed our world so we don't have to think about time's scalding realities.
— Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
Balle's novel is philosophical in a robust sense. Its range is ambitious, encompassing all three of the questions that, according to Kant, comprise philosophy's fundamental concerns: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?
— Clare Carlisle, The Yale Review
On the Calculation of Volume is a practicum in novelty, but whatever philosophical positions underpin Balle’s world, I suspect they won’t be so easily reducible to one program or another, and that the form of the novel itself is her answer to these deepest and strangest of our questions, her chosen method of doing philosophy.
